I have received generous support from many people and have incurred numerous debts in researching and writing this project. Any shortcomings in the arguments presented here are solely my responsibility. I am pleased to finally thank those who helped me complete this book.
This project evolved out of my doctoral research. My thesis adviser at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Ronald P. Toby, and thesis committee members, Elizabeth Oyler, Robert Tierney, Brian Ruppert, and numerous others, most notably Atsuko Ueda, Kevin M. Doak, Theodore Hughes, Sho Konishi, Emanuel Pastreich, the late David Goodman, and the late JaHyun Kim Haboush, offered intellectual support and insights that shaped my ideas about narrative, identity, and Japan. Setsuko Noguchi at the Japanese Studies Collection at the library offered much help every time I needed to find articles and other materials. Many of these colleagues have since left Champaign, but I am very grateful to them for their patience and tireless encouragement, as well as their willingness to show me what is entailed in embarking on a scholarly pursuit.
I am indebted to Narita Ryūichi at Japan Women’s University. He allowed me to attend his graduate seminar and oversaw my studies on Shiga Shigetaka. His encouragement for me to meet the late Kamei Hideo at Hokkaidō University proved very important, not only because of the actual visit but because it allowed me to experience the sense of place and feel the significance of Sapporo. This enabled me to expand
Several scholars generously provided feedback that tremendously helped me reconceptualize my dissertation into a book. At the University of Southern California, I received guidance from Gordon Berger, David Bialock, Philip J. Ethington, Janet Goodwin, and Joan Piggott. Tomoko Bialock has been of invaluable help since then to obtain access for me to rare and special collection materials. Special thanks are due to the amazing scholars from the program in Digital Humanities at UCLA, most notably Yoh Kawano for his enduring support, faith in my work, and friendship. He never failed to suggest answers to my questions relating to the digitization and visualization of maps, itineraries, and other textual materials with which I was in danger of being swamped. On every occasion, he came up with solutions almost instantly, always exceeding my expectations. I will be forever grateful to him for producing the maps and the direction charts for this book.
My breakthrough moments came during my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. I offer many thanks to all the excellent undergraduate and graduate students who challenged me in my early modern Japanese history courses. Their questions were instrumental in encouraging me to rethink the notion of authority, the idea of public and private, and the process of state formation and community formation, and they forced me to reimagine the space of early modernity without the bias of presentist perceptions. I was very fortunate to experience the company of enthusiastic, kind, and critical colleagues. I am grateful to all of them, especially Michael Bourdaghs, Kyeong-Hee Choi, Jacob Eyferth, Chelsea Foxwell, Paola Iovene, Reggie Jackson, Ashton Lazarus, Hoyt Long, and James E. Ketelaar. I am truly indebted to Susan L. Burns, who critically read my manuscript at different stages and helped me clarify my thoughts and arguments in an encouraging manner. This study would have been completely different had I not taken the time to revise it again in Chicago, deciding to incorporate the outstanding resources the late Okuizumi Eizaburō had assiduously built up as part of the collection
Most recently, I received generous support from the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where I now work. I am deeply thankful to the director, Ondřej Beránek, and my boss, Jakub Hrubý, for providing me with just about everything I needed to complete this book. I extend my gratitude to my copyeditor, Steven Patten, for carefully reading the entire manuscript in a very timely manner. The anonymous readers for the Harvard University Asia Center deserve special thanks for their valuable suggestions, many of which I followed with appreciation. I am sincerely grateful to Robert Graham and his team for producing this book with much enthusiasm.
I was blessed with the support of wonderful friends, who all had a profound influence on me in relation to my thoughts on the production of knowledge, different forms of activism, and being a historian. Robert I. Hellyer, Emer O’Dwyer, Yi Wang, Valerie Barske, Hilary Snow, Robert Goree, Kazumi Koga, Isomae Jun’ichi, Aratake Ken’ichirō, Chris Gerteis, Matt Perry, and James Babb have given fantastic support and continue to be my inspiration. David L. Howell and Mariko Tamanoi have been exemplary scholars in every sense of the word ever since I met them at the Social Science Research Council Dissertation Workshop. I am profoundly indebted to them for their support and faith in my project from a very early stage, which was at times the only positive light I saw.
Last but not least, I am forever thankful to my family—my parents, my sisters, and their terrific families. During my long years of study, they all remained hopeful and optimistic about me and my work. This book would not have been possible without their understanding and support and so, with utmost gratitude, I dedicate this book to them.